The fashion photographer is, by the peculiar alchemy of the form, simultaneously artist and servant. They serve the garment, the magazine, the client, the model, the creative director who has arrived on set at eight in the morning with a reference board and a vision that may or may not survive contact with the available light. And yet the greatest practitioners of this hybrid art have managed, within these constraints, to produce images of such originality and force that they transcend their commercial occasion entirely and take their place in the broader history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century visual culture. How they navigate this tension — between commission and vision, between the demands of commerce and the imperatives of art — is among the most interesting stories in the history of photography.
Richard Avedon: The Interior Life of Surfaces
Richard Avedon understood, earlier and more completely than almost any of his peers, that fashion photography did not need to choose between beauty and truth. His model portraits from the late 1950s and 1960s — Dovima with Elephants, Jean Shrimpton in the empty corridors of a Paris hotel, Suzy Parker laughing in a way that seemed entirely unrelated to the dress she was wearing — showed that the person inside the clothes was the most interesting element of the image. Beauty, for Avedon, was never purely decorative; it was always psychologically charged, always slightly uncomfortable, always asking the viewer to consider the human being who was wearing it.
His later portraits — the brutal, unsparing series made in the American West, the political portraits of the 1970s and 1980s — are conventionally described as departing from fashion photography into something more serious. But this misunderstands his project. Avedon brought the same searching gaze to everything he photographed. The fashion work and the documentary work are not in contradiction; they are different applications of the same fundamental curiosity about the relationship between the face and the world behind it.
Helmut Newton: The Territory of Desire
Where Avedon sought truth, Helmut Newton sought electricity — the particular charge that exists between power and beauty, between the dominant and the desired. His fashion images, made primarily for French Vogue across three decades from the 1960s, were scandalous on first publication and are still unsettling in a way that refuses to be historicised away. Newton photographed women not as passive objects of male desire but as participants in a complex game of power and display, often placing them in positions of considerable authority even as — or perhaps especially as — they were impeccably, erotically dressed.
The Berlin upbringing, the flight from Nazi Germany, the adopted Australian citizenship, the long years working in Monaco with his wife June — who published her own fashion work under the name Alice Springs — are all present in the imagery, if not literally then in atmosphere: the displaced grandeur, the European decadence, the constant sense that the world beneath the beautiful surface is engaged in something not entirely innocent.
Deborah Turbeville: The Dream Logic of Fashion
Deborah Turbeville occupies a position in the history of fashion photography that has never been adequately fixed — partly because her work is so difficult to categorise, so resistant to the commercial efficiency that most fashion imagery aspires to. Her images are atmospheric to the point of narrative, laden with a sense of time stopped and event suspended. Her famous 1975 Vogue portfolio shot in the women’s bathhouse — models in various states of undress and apparent distress, draped across tile and iron and damp concrete — provoked fury from the magazine’s editors and immediate, lasting recognition from the photography world. It remains one of the most disquieting and original fashion images ever published.
Turbeville described her own work as influenced by the Pictorialists, by early cinema, by the quality of European memory — by, above all, a sense of story that most fashion photography deliberately suppressed. Her willingness to make images that felt wrong, that refused the reassurance of conventional beauty, was an act of artistic courage in a field that tends to reward the opposite.
Nick Knight: Technology as Vision
Nick Knight, who has been working at the intersection of fashion and photography since the early 1980s, represents the form’s most committed engagement with technological possibility. From his early work with digital manipulation at a time when such practices were novel to his founding of SHOWstudio — the pioneering fashion film and new media platform that has, since its 2000 launch, fundamentally altered the way fashion image-making is exhibited and consumed — Knight has treated the question of what a fashion photograph can be as permanently open.
His 2009 shoot with Alexander McQueen, in which flowers were suspended in a cryogenic chamber to capture the precise moment of their crystallisation, produced images of cold, crystalline beauty that could not have been made by any other combination of artist and technology at any other moment. The result was fashion photography as scientific poetry — a reminder that the form, at its most ambitious, operates at the boundary between the humanly felt and the technologically possible.
The artists who have advanced fashion photography have done so by refusing its limitations with an intelligence and a stubbornness that belongs entirely to themselves. In doing so, they have given us not merely beautiful images of beautiful clothes, but an archive of what it felt like — desired, aspired to, feared, imagined — to be alive and conscious of style in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. That archive is, in its way, irreplaceable.